Reclaiming the Public University: What Role for Higher Education Workers and Trade Unions?

Industrial action in the UK higher education sector since 2018 has shone a light on the multiple crises that impact the system. Universities had already been badly affected by the imposition of a tuition fee funding model and aggressive marketisation, but increasingly find themselves at the centre of the new culture wars. There is growing state interest in the activities of academics and interventions into actions on university campuses. In an age of colliding crises, the traditional role of the public university is increasingly being questioned. In recent years these developments have been paralleled by industrial action by the University and College Union (UCU) whose members have been in disputes with university employers over pensions, pay and working conditions. In this article I argue that this industrial action represented an important struggle over the material conditions of university workers, but it also represented a more fundamental, if often implicit, challenge to academic capitalism and the neoliberal university. However, despite an important victory in relation to pensions for workers in some universities, the outcome of the sector-wide dispute on pay and working conditions must be considered as a defeat. In the article I offer an explanation for this setback, and assess whether, and in what ways, a trade union like UCU can contribute to a radical reclaiming, and reinvention, of the public university.